A key figure in the effort to privatize the state liquor stores said Wednesday he is less bullish that a privatization plan will be enacted before the legislature takes it's summer break.

Commonwealth Foundation President Matthew Brouillette said the series of state Senate hearings on the proposal first articulated by Gov. Tom Corbett and subsequently passed with adjustments by the House has featured testimony exclusively from interests objecting to privatization.

View full sizeState Sen. Chuck McIlhinney, R-Bucks County, chairs the senate Law and Justice Committee.

Meanwhile, he added, organizations that want to see Pennsylvania get out of the the liquor business have seen their requests to testify before the Senate's Law and Justice Committee rebuffed.

“The hearings have really taken a turn for the worse,” Brouillette said Wednesday, a day after the second of three Senate hearings. “There are no proponents of privatization given an opportunity to express their position.”

Brouillette, one of the driving forces behind liquor privatization, said the effort has been particularly stymied by a tenuous web of political alliances and well-connected lobbyists. He singled out Michael Long and Todd Nyquist, two lobbyists with intimate political ties to Senate Republican leaders - as the prime culprits.

“These folks are hired guns that play for one team [Republicans], but if they're paid more, they're going against the very same people they're helping get elected,” Brouillette said.

The men's firm, Long Nyquist & Associates, is representing the liquor store employees' union and some beer distributors in the privatization debate.

Considered two of the state's top GOP legislative strategists, both men are former senior Senate staffers, with Nyquist having been chief of staff to current Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati.

“It's that inside baseball game that seems to happen all the time in Harrisburg,” he said, adding that it's been eye-opening “seeing all of the relationships that drive all the things in politics.”

Despite Brouillette's frustration over the hearings and concern over the shrinking window left for passage, others in the pro-privatization coalition remain hopeful that a bill will make it out of the Senate, a compromise be found with the House, and the consensus legislation reach Corbett's desk by June 30.

“I don't share that [Brouillette's] view,” said Kevin Shivers, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business in Pennsylvania.

Though the pro-privatization beer distributors lined up to testify in Tuesday's Senate hearing were not allowed to speak, Shivers said he was able to convey their interests to the committee and the Senate at-large afterwards.

“Because we were not allowed to testify in that hearing, we spent the rest of our day meeting individually with senators, and quite frankly, I think our time was better spent,” he said. “We are carrying out a 50 senator strategy to get privatization done.”

“The chairman, at least what I heard yesterday, said that he's working on a plan that would get the votes in his caucus,” Shivers said. “I take Chairman McIlhinney's word for that. We have worked with him in the past on a variety of pieces of legislation, and nothing he has done would make me believe he is acting in anything other than good faith.”

Pennsylvania Food Merchants Association President David McCorkle, another privatization proponent, was more neutral in his assessment of McIlhinney's intentions.

“I don't know that I'm any more or less optimistic” since the House bill passed,” McCorkle said. “We knew it would face a real challenge in the Senate, and that challenge continues.”

A McIlhinney aide noted that the final hearing, slated for early June, will feature testimony from the Corbett
administration and privatization proponents, and that commenting on Brouillette's concerns now would be premature.

Even though Brouillette considers the Senate hearings this far something of a dog and pony show, he said he still holds out hope that McIlhinney will deliver a privatization bill.

“I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that he is trying to figure something out,” Brouillette said. “But I think he needs to listen to a lot more people than just those that benefit from the current system of government-run alcohol.”

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